So, we ran into some bad luck this week and our latest update got rejected, we don't have a definitive answer as to why but they said it was due to us using a copyrighted image and we are guessing that its because of a option icon that looks like an iPhone. We changed it to look like a generic screen as well as changed a iphone that we had in the help pages since update 4 that looks like an iphone as well. Not sure why they chose this week to be picky but hopefully this update goes through. I also just want to let everyone know that we are not slowing down in our updating, even though a update didn't come out this week, the new update we resubmitted contains both the fishing and the ants update (including feint). And we are working on 1.13 now, "Say My Name!".

So, this week, with the ant update, we added a community service called Feint. For those of you who don't know, Fient is the chat service that Aurora Feint currently uses, the developers opened access up to a limited number of companies during the next month or so and then they will open it to more companies after they get an idea of how much traffic games like ours will add to their server architecture. Currently, the Feint features are on a screen that you can access from the options menu but I'm pretty excited about this because it means that we can eventually change it to allow us to add more community features directly in the game.

We also made some great progress in optimization, with all our updates, the game was starting to get a little laggy because of all the objects on the screen. What was wierd about it, was that when a touch is active on the screen, the framerate would get cut in half (even if nothing was happening in the touch logic). I was able to trace it down to our open gl calls where they same number of calls took twice as long during a touch. Not sure why, it might be some kind of thread conflict, or maybe openGl uses the floating point unit and the base code in the touch logic causes the CPU to switch between 32 bit mode which is required for floating point and thumb mode which is kind of like a shorthand instruction set that is more commonly used for tasks. Anyway, not sure of the exact reason why and not enough time to figure it out but I created a wrapper around opengl that did some simple checks to make sure that we didnt call it unless we absolutely had to (ie, no sense in settig a rotation if the rotation is 0 or no sense in setting the active texture if its the same one we used for the last display object).

In a continuation of this, I'm actually thinking of pulling out all the matrix calculations from open gl and just doing it on my side. might be faster. and also each object has its own texture coordinate and vertex arrays, It might be quicker to fool open gl into thinking there is only 1 of each and just copy the data into it on my side. have to check if its faster but now I want to reduce the number of open gl calls as much as I can.

Other than this, I am really bummed about not getting our update out. we had an april fools joke planned where users would see the following screen at the start of the game.

Once they click on it, they would get a message "April Fools" and then the real episode would start. We stayed up so late to get this in, it really stinks that they decided to pick this week to be strick about the reivew process.

@edit

Hey guys, we're looking to get some more attention despite the fact that our update didn't come out this week. please help us spread this viral video and feel free to post comments.

Apple has no idea how to review games... And they have the audacity to allow so many juvenile applications. They should just do what Nintendo does... Nothing. Just allow any and everything. You'll get some bad, but I bet you'll get much good, as well. Apple can go to hell when it comes to approving quality games. Good luck. Still waiting for fishy.

Apple has no idea how to review games... And they have the audacity to allow so many juvenile applications. They should just do what Nintendo does... Nothing. Just allow any and everything. You'll get some bad, but I bet you'll get much good, as well. Apple can go to hell when it comes to approving quality games. Good luck. Still waiting for fishy.

In my opinion apple should let ESRB rate games and follow suit with the ESRB system. ... that way we can at least get some M rated games out there. ... I know it is a different subject than copyright breach, but hey, just throwing an idea out there.

In my opinion apple should let ESRB rate games and follow suit with the ESRB system. ... that way we can at least get some M rated games out there. ... I know it is a different subject than copyright breach, but hey, just throwing an idea out there.

ESRB Ratings are expensive. that would close the doors on a lot of independant developers.

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